China and the Shrinking Green Energy Sector

Photo of Douglas A. McIntyre
By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Published
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The race to replace fossil fuels with “green” energy slowed last year. As the industry struggled, China took the lead among nations with green energy investments. It is not much of a prize, as the many countries have decided the environment is not as important as the economy.

A study by Pew that covered the green energy sector in 2012 showed:

Although 2012 investment levels worldwide declined 11 percent, to $269 billion, the clean energy sector weathered the withdrawal of priority incentives and initiatives offered by governments in numerous key markets, demonstrating its resilience. Reliable clean energy investment data have been collected for nine years now. Looking at the data in three-year increments, average clean energy investment increased by at least $90 billion triennially — from an average of $64 billion in the 2004-06 period to an average of $156 billion in 2007-09 and $245 billion in 2010-12.

In other words, things got better in the industry, even though they got worse. Among the major categories of clean energy — wind, small hydro, biomas, solar, geothermal and marine — China’s investment was well ahead of the next two nations — the United States and Germany. China’s investment was $65.1 billion, the U.S.’s was $35.6 billion and Germany’s $22.8 billion. With the rise of shale oil and gas, “green” may continue to shrink for years to come.

Photo of Douglas A. McIntyre
About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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